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When Sienna Martens and her McCallum High School varsity volleyball teammates returned to practice in late July, the heat inside the gym was bad enough that simply keeping the floor dry became a crucial part of the workout.
Martens, a 17-year-old senior, said the gym felt like it was in the high 80s even with three large fans running. Players were sweating so heavily that the court became slick. “It became a safety hazard to play,” she said. “We were having to wipe the court off every, like, five minutes because it just wasn’t safe anymore.”
Her English classroom’s air conditioning went out for roughly three weeks, including the day of the AP Literature diagnostic test. Other classrooms present the opposite problem: Martens said her anatomy classroom can be so cold that she carries a sweatshirt in her backpack even on hot Austin days.
“Will the AC be out in my class today? Will I have freezing cold AC in my class?” she asked. “It’s kind of like an unknown.”
The continuing breakdowns come as Austin ISD faces questions and concerns about how it spent bond money intended to improve heating and cooling systems as the district continues multiyear efforts to modernize aging buildings. Though school district leaders say earlier bond programs delivered needed upgrades at many campuses, students, teachers and parents describe persistent and uneven temperature problems, raising confusion about which equipment was replaced, what work remains unfinished and why some schools are still relying on temporary fixes or repeated repairs.
Money available vs. needs
In 2022, Austin voters approved a $2.44 billion bond package that included hundreds of projects targeting chronic building problems such as air-conditioning, plumbing, electrical systems and roofs. At the time, the district identified $248.2 million for maintenance of building systems including HVAC, plumbing and roof repairs.
Four years later, AISD says 41 campuses have received some level of HVAC work funded through the bond. Fifteen have received major HVAC improvements; six full modernization projects have included complete HVAC system replacements; and about 20 campuses have received smaller targeted projects.
Another 30 bond-funded HVAC projects remain, with construction scheduled between summer 2027 and summer 2028. The district says that timeline is consistent with the bond program’s planned implementation schedule and stresses that the 2022 package was never designed to replace every aging air conditioning component in the district.
Over several years of analysis for multiple bond proposals, AISD identified roughly $4 billion in districtwide facility deficiencies, a figure substantially higher than the $2.4 billion voters ultimately approved.
“A campus may therefore have Bond-funded HVAC improvements while experiencing issues with a different HVAC component that was not included in the original bond scope,” the district said in written responses to the Austin Free Press.
Those substantial gaps mean that, at some campuses, construction crews are replacing or upgrading equipment while students in other parts of the same buildings continue to deal with failing or inconsistent cooling.
Fixes and failings
At McCallum, the district is in the middle of a $66.5 million first phase of multi-phase modernization, expected to be completed by January 2027. The project includes construction of a new science and technical education building as well as HVAC, electrical, plumbing, and roofing improvements to the existing campus. The district’s latest construction update states mechanical and electrical replacements are underway within the existing building.
Martens and fellow McCallum senior Edward Dickinson said those improvements have not eliminated large temperature differences between parts of the school. Dickinson described cooling problems that can affect one side of a hallway differently from rooms across from it, and said the heat has at times made it difficult to concentrate long enough to finish assignments.
The problem looks somewhat different at Northeast Early College High School, where English teacher Erica Hoffman said air-conditioning failures became roughly a weekly occurrence from the summer through the beginning of this school year.
Hoffman’s 10th-grade students were sitting in class recently using folders and notebooks as fans. The heat was so oppressive that Hoffman propped her classroom door open, ordinarily against school policy for safety reasons. Other teachers have sometimes moved classes to courtyards or cooler areas of the building, she said.
“Is this a conducive learning environment for kids?” Hoffman recalled wondering.
Northeast is also in the middle of a much larger bond project. The district is spending nearly $118 million on the first phase of a modernization there, including central-plant improvements and new infrastructure supporting upgraded heating and cooling systems.
Hoffman said the campus recently received a secondary rental chiller after its existing system struggled to keep up.
That kind of temporary fix was one of the costs Austin ISD specifically pointed to when asking voters to support the 2022 bond. District officials said at the time that replacing aging building systems could reduce recurring maintenance expenses, noting that AISD had spent about $1.7 million in one year renting temporary HVAC equipment districtwide.
Credit: Austin ISD
Slow but steady progress
AISD says campuses where major equipment has been replaced are seeing fewer repairs and lower operating costs tied to those components.
But other aging equipment remains. “Without the 2022 Bond, our HVAC issues would be drastically larger than they are today,” the district said.
AISD says it is not seeing evidence that HVAC systems are failing significantly faster than anticipated when the bond was developed. Instead, officials point to the scale of the original facilities backlog. With additional identified needs of more than $1 billion past what the bond could cover, equipment not selected for replacement continues to age and require repairs.
In some cases, equipment already scheduled for replacement doesn’t even reach its planned retirement date. The district pointed to Anderson High School, where it reported a chiller failed just weeks before its scheduled replacement was to begin.
Not every cooling problem is confined to an aging campus awaiting modernization. Bryce Georg, whose 8-year-old attends Menchaca Elementary, has watched HVAC problems from both sides. Until recently, she spent about five years as the school’s campus administrative assistant, with submitting maintenance work orders part of her responsibilities.
Menchaca’s modernized campus opened in 2020 after being rebuilt through the district’s 2017 bond program. Even as a newer site, Georg said heating and cooling problems recurred during her time working there, and her son complained again this school year about classrooms becoming uncomfortably hot.
Georg said work orders sometimes required direct follow-up with district personnel when repairs did not happen quickly enough.
Her older child, who attends Akins High School, has described another version of the same inconsistency: One classroom might be chilly while another is hot enough that students are sweating.
For Georg, that unpredictability is what makes the problem feel larger than any single broken unit. “It’s not a campus issue,” she said. “It’s a district issue.”
Chad Swiatecki is a 30-year journalist who relocated to Austin from his home state of Michigan in 2008. He most enjoys covering the intersection of arts, business and local/state politics. He has written for Rolling Stone, Spin, New York Daily News, Texas Monthly, Austin Monitor, Austin Business Journal, Austin American-Statesman and many other regional and national outlets.
